Sunday, March 25, 2012

In reference to the new revenge-of-nature film Rise of the Animals (introduced to you here on Brainspasm in February), we've learned that an official release date of May 1st has been announced. On that day, the film will be available on DVD via Brain Damage Films. Below is the final highly amusing DVD art.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Wendigo? Loup-Garou? Wolf-headed man? Rugaru? Whatever, it's a swamp monster and that's always a good thing, right? Check out this early rough teaser (which was a test run and is not reflective of the final product, we're told).

Rugaru (US-2012; dir. Tony Severio) is a new in-production horror film that features a monster, a voodoo curse and lots of doomed people. It's about to go into full production but just the trailer is looking good, so this is another independent feature we can be hopeful about.

Synopsis:

Voodoo is unleashed in a small backwoods bayou town in the form of a large hairy beast which comes face to face with an unlikely hero with his own curse.
A thug from the bayou releases horror in the deep backwoods after soliciting the services of a nefarious voodoo witch for protection - giving rise to a terrifying creature of Cajun folklore.
After a convict disappears, parole officer Claude Bruneaux investigates -- only to discover the curse plaguing the tiny swamp community. An unlikely hero with his own demons, he races to unlock the mystery which has summoned the beast. With nothing to lose, Bruneaux struggles between his own trial of finding peace within...and getting out alive beyond what waits for him in the murky bayou.

Final Official Trailer:

Behind the Scenes Images:

Stills:

Cast:

Randall Oliver - Lead, Plays Claude Bruneaux

Joe Estevez - Mitch. The wicked sheriff.

Amye Gousset - Lana. Claude's Wife

Chrisopher Severio - Blake. A bad guy that teams with Claude

Krystal Tomlin - Malida. The Voodoo expert.

Robert Douthat - Ian Causey. The nemesis in the film other than the Rugaru!

What with assorted cryptozoological monsters and an endless supply of psychopathic lunatics, the US backwoods is a place well worth avoiding. Go there and you may not get out alive.

Get Out Alive is a new independent film that takes the standard cryptid horror ethos a few steps further into darkness -- bringing into play not only the dark of the unknown that lurks all around us but the darkness that exists within humanity as well. Written and directed by Clay DuMaw, Get Out Alive begins with the stranding of a pair of innocents -- a brother and sister -- at a sinister truck-stop, and proceeds to drag them through hell. Take a look at the rather lengthy trailer, which incorporates a long sequence from the film.

Extended Trailer:

Synopsis:

While driving home from their summer vacation, siblings Paul and Marilyn find themselves stranded at a desolate truck-stop when their car breaks down along the back roads of upstate New York. Before long, they discover a strange creature in a cage behind the local auto shop, to which the shop's mechanic, along with his assistant, plan on feeding them. In their attempt to escape, Paul and Marilyn fall prey to a pair of homicidal locals bent on preserving the secret of their bloodthirsty pet monster.

On set: David Fichtenmayer and Tyler Sutton

The Brainspasm's news-gathering crypto-hunter, Avery Guerra, tracked down director DuMaw (pictured below, with camera) to get the inside story of Get Out Alive!

According to DuMaw, the film began as something rather different:

It [originated as] a thirty-page screenplay about several people trapped in a motel during an alien invasion. A lot of changes were made since then. The sci-fi idea was dropped in favor of monsters, murderers, bear traps, and of course, a chainsaw.

I'm a big fan of horror films from the late '70s and early '80s, so I
tried to incorporate as many influences from that era as I could. Get
Out Alive is like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, mixed with Friday the 13th,
with a dash of Basket Case and Tremors, sprinkled with some modern
influences like Jeepers Creepers. The funny thing about this movie is
that we couldn't afford to make our original version of the script
because the monster was in almost every scene. So instead, I re-wrote it
as a sequel, which takes place after the monster has been captured and
the guy who spent his whole life chasing this thing has gone mad and is
now the bad guy. Who knows, maybe someday I'll film the original version
of the script and make it a prequel!

Stylistically, DuMaw had a distinct vision for what he wanted to achieve:

A number of techniques were implemented in this film in order to amplify the intensity of certain scenes. Most sequences were shot from several extra angles, setting a faster pace when necessary and allowing greater editing options. Action scenes were shot in twenty-four frames-per-second (cinema frame rate), contrasting the look and feel of the rest of the film, which was shot in the standard thirty frames-per-second. And because of the project’s tight schedule, I was forced to shoot many scenes in a handheld style which ultimately complemented the film’s esthetic.

I also wanted to differentiate the look of the film from the ones typically shown in theaters. To accomplish this, high definition cameras were used without the aid of 35mm lenses or depth-of-field adapters, resulting in a deeper image with a greater focal range. This gave the film an appearance similar to footage shown on the news. There’s something beautiful about video, a sort of gritty realism that you just can’t get with 35mm film.

DuMaw remembers two moments in his life very clearly, moments critical to getting where he is today:

When I was about
seven years old, my parents took me to see Jurassic Park,
and it sparked an obsession with dinosaurs. I was convinced that I
wanted to be a paleontologist just like the character of Dr Grant in the
film. However, the more movies I saw, the more I changed my mind on
what I wanted to be when I grew up. Then one day when I was twelve or
thirteen, I realized that I was basing all my career choices around my
obsession with movies. So I thought, "I could pretend to be all of these
things, if I just became a movie director!" As years went by, I went
down a path that a lot of teenagers who weren't popular in high school
went down: I joined a rock band, played the drums and thought I was going
to be a rock star. Eventually I decided I wasn't exactly living the dream, so I quit the band to study art in college. It was after I finished my first semester that I was struck by an
epiphany: "What the hell am I doing?" I was living in a crappy
apartment with a bunch of sketchy roommates, working a job that I hated
with a passion, and I was going to school in pursuit of something that definitely wasn't going to give me a career. My life sucked! That
realization dawned on me while I was straightening a rack of tee-shirts
at my job. A few seconds later, I went to my boss and told him that I
was leaving and that I wasn't coming back. I went straight from work to
my apartment, packed up all my things and moved out. I was so happy that
I didn't even realize I was driving 88mph on an interstate highway
and got pulled over for speeding. It was somewhere between when I
started driving and when I got pulled over that I thought to myself,
"I've already got this screenplay that I've been working on. This is the perfect time. I should just go for it!" Other than the ticket, it was a pretty awesome day.

Like many filmmakers working with fantastical subjects, DuMaw gained initial inspiration from the Big Box-office Names in the field:

When I was younger, I used to look up to a lot of mainstream filmmakers
like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, M. Night Shyamalan, etc... Then one
day when I was looking through a bargain bin full of DVDs with my dad, I
found a copy of Night of the Living Dead. All I can say is that George
A. Romero changed my life. A few years later, when I watched a "making
of" video on Dawn of the Dead, I figured out that there
was actually a community of independent filmmakers out there who scraped
together money to make their own movies. I loved Dawn of the Dead so
much that my first tattoo was the zombie-head logo from the poster.
Eventually I became more and more interested in independent
filmmakers, who were like the "underdogs" of the movie industry. Right
now I'm really into filmmakers like Gareth Edwards, Steven Soderbergh
and Adam Green. Those guys are doing the films that they want to make, and I really respect that.

Don't ask me what my favourite films are or I'll give you a list
longer than you'll ever be willing to read. It's always my goal to
watch at least two movies every day that I haven't seen before. I guess
instead of my favorite films, it’d be easier to tell you what I've been
watching lately. I just saw a film called Chop, which was an
independent horror/comedy. I think that combination of genres is really
great. I finally got around to seeing 50/50 and The Lookout. I
think Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a very underrated actor with a lot of
potential. I also just watched We Bought a Zoo, which I thought was an
extremely well-constructed film. I mean you can tell that my tastes in
movies are kind of scattered, but I just love really great stories, and
I'm not picky about it. I think that if I watch a movie and I got some
form of amusement out of it, then that film did its job.

From left: David Fichtenmayer, Clay DuMaw and Jesse Maner

Though DuMaw has made a few shorts before this, Get Out Alive is his first feature and he found the experience "stressful, annoying, lonesome, exhausting, scary, exciting, fun, and
just all around amazing."

It was everything that I hoped it would be, and
I can’t wait to do it again! During production there were plenty of hardships, just like any other film, yet somehow everything fell into place. I’ve always been the type of person who learns something by trying it, and making Get Out Alive has been one of the greatest learning experiences of my life.

Currently finishing up a rough cut of the film, which means he's about to undertake "the 100+ FX shots that need CGI work done to them", he remains undaunted. "The CGI work isn't a very
difficult thing for me to do by myself," he commented. "So it should only take a couple
of months. Meanwhile, I have a guy scoring the music for the
film. After that, all I'll have left to do is redub a few lines, do the
Foley recordings and then mix the sound. We hope to have the film done
and entered in festivals by late spring / early summer."

Get Out Alive stars David Fichtenmayer, Rhiannon Roberts, David Iannotti, Tyler Sutton, Jesse Maner and Jay Storey, and is written, directed produced and edited by Clay DuMaw, with Tyler Sutton as Assistant Director, and Lighting and Sound by Jesse Maner. Produced by Clay Pigeon Studios and filmed in Cathage, NY, the film had a budget of an estimated $10,000, most of which came from Clay himself -- though an appeal for additional funding on Kickstarter saw $1,443 pledged toward a $500 goal.

Monday, March 5, 2012

There was always something strangely attractive about those silly 1940s/1950s B-film horror flicks that feature apes that go on a rampage, their human "occupant" not really hidden by cheap ape-suits that must have seen a lot of action over the years, as they seemed to get increasingly tatty as time went by. Must have been all those blondes they ran around with. Mind you, the fake ape suits work well in comedies of the kind made by The Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello: "Quit monkeying around, Lou!" Hard to take seriously really.

Probably Joel Potrykus, director of Coyote, isn't making that sort of film.

Sob Noisse Movies brings us the upcoming feature film Ape, written and directed by Potrykus. It's his first feature. Once again, Potrykus teams up with
Joshua Burge, the star of their super-8 werewolf short “Coyote.” As he did in that film, Burge
plays a man with problems, but this time he fights back.

Synopsis:

Trevor Newandyke is a struggling small-time comedian. Not
only does he bomb on stage, but he bombs in everyday life. To him, it’s the
little things that matter most. He’s fed up with the threats from the cable
company, 7-11 raising the price of the Slurpee, and all the jerks who think
they can push him around. All he wants is a break, and for someone to get him.
Not everyone, just someone.

But instead of taking a breath and getting himself
together or taking his anger to the stage, he turns to the loud din of his
headphones and the crackling glow of fire to ease his mind. He’s not only a
lousy comic, but a pyromaniac, as well.
After a typical night disappointing the crowd he finds that
one of his jokes begins to come to life. A fruit salesman posing as the Devil
strikes a bargain with Trevor. A golden apple for a joke.

He treasures the apple, seeing it as a sign or a magical
object. But after some troubling news he tells the audience that it’s likely
just an apple and meaningless. He decides to just eat it. It’s good, too. Makes
Trevor feel something.
The next day he finally reaches his boiling point during the
clamor of his neighbors fighting.

But instead of hiding behind a match or
homemade flame thrower, he instead turns to the baseball bat. He not only hits hard against those in his way, but he finds his voice on stage as well. He tells it
like it is. No fluff.
From here, Trevor lets go. He’s mad as hell and he’s not
going to take it anymore. Of course, deals with the Devil don’t ever turn out
well.

Ape hits independent theaters in the summer of 2012 in the US, with a
DVD release in October.

Thoughtful Dead.... Zombies who always send you a card on your birthday? Who always wash the dishes after dinner? Who let you watch to the end of the movie before they eat your eyeballs? Who let you pee before sending you off into the afterlife (where, of course, there are no toilets)?

Well, not quite.

Thoughtful Dead: The Good and Evil Dead (directed by Ira Cooper) is a short, 10 minute zombie noir film about a zombie, aptly named
Brains, who unlike his fellow undead, has retained his ability to think.

"The walking dead do not think," Cooper explained. "They are vermin,
an infestation, an annoyance. Brains is possibly the only of his kind
who can think. Unable to relate to his undead comrades or speak to
people, who see him as a detestable subhuman, he is trapped within his
own thoughts, his own internal conversations and a landscape of towering
piles of books."

Teaser:

Okay, a thinking zombie? Not quite like a sparkling vampire, but what's the point? Cooper sees the concept of cognizant zombie to have significant metaphorical applicablility.

The idea of a thinking zombie comes from a very true place. Without
getting into specifics, there are a plethora problems all around our
globe now that fully cognitive and aware human beings are causing or
letting happen. Brains, the thinking zombie, hates his own kind for their destructive nature, and yet that is just it -- it's simply their
nature to do so. They don't think about killing, they don't pre-conceive
destruction, they have not a single forethought. Brains holds up human
beings on a plateau and yet when it comes to evil deeds that Brains
detests about his own kind, humans are the only one's who can think and
are therefore accountable for their actions. So you might say this is a film about the
responsibility we have to our world and to others, to be able to think
and act on our thoughts. In Brains' universe, zombies are a minority --
slow, thoughtless and easily spotted. The analogy there is obvious and
yet it still happens in the smallest ways, where our perception of a
group of individuals is jam-packed with pre-conceived notions based on
folklore and stereotypes.

Cooper describes his approach as noir, by which I assume he means shadowy and dark. When we asked, we found it was not only the typical noir film's basic aesthetic he was referring to but also the classic embattled Chandler hero.

Why noir? Well, Brains is stuck in his own head, quite literally, and what better
classic gimmick than the ol' loner detective running narrative. Using
that convention, I am able to have him converse with himself, as well as
speak in a heightened era type of speech, lending itself to his outcast
persona. Brains is not the reinvention of the wheel, no, there have been
many Brains before. This is just a stylistic tweak on the archetypal
tortured soul, in that this victim of circumstance has no soul.

I admit I'm intrigued.

Clearly though it's not all metaphysics. When asked about the production itself Cooper explained that it was being produced by Tape Mouth Films, and that "the cool effects" were variously done some post and some in camera. "All the scars,
makeup effects, shot gun holes etc. were designs and put together by my
brilliant makeup team," he added. "The flying blood from gun shots, pistols and a
lot of the lighting compositions was done in post by me."

Cooper says of himself:

I started off as a little kid with a grandiose imagination who wanted to
act. I took every acting class I could find in my city, went to theatre
school in University, worked in local theatres here and around. I
realised it was the creative forces behind the actors, the words that
they say, the scenes that they were stuck in, that I wanted to be a part
of.

[My earlier work] was a lot of absurdist comedy. That is what I liked creating
in the theatre world, looking to writers like Alfred Jarry and Nickolai
Gogol for inspiration. It was the same for my film-world inspirations. I
was intrigued by the boundless, limitless ideas of auteurs like Buster
Keaton, Luis Bunuel, Guillermo Del Toro and Orson Welles to name a few. I
made shorts with my friend Angel under Fortunato Films for short film
competitions, with titles like Time's A Dick, Bird Poo, Talk Block and
The Immigrants. I also delved into the world of comedic horror, making
films such as Ghoulfellas (Best
Script), Green Streets and Raging Bieber for the Bloodshots 48 Film Festival.

I started to want to make films more obscure, more Mel Brooks, more off
the wall. I wrote and shot a few veiled satires such as Anti Porn, a
film about the over-sexualization of relationships and the responsibilities of "being in the moment." I've screened this film many
times. It has a few fans and A LOT of polite people approaching me
after watching it, saying they had no clue what was going on. I also
completed a film dealing with our perception of homelessness, which is
very swept under the rug topic in Vancouver. I'm also an avid cyclist,
who is working on a film about positive globalization through shared
experiences, couch surfing and travel.

As you can probably tell, I like to write and find it hard to place a
stopper at an appropriate point. I never wanted to make a career out of
film. There are just too many nasty associations that come along with
tainting my love of it as a career. I enjoy working with local
filmmakers with no budgets, to evolve ideas as a collective and to make
wonderful stories to entertain whoever is willing to watch. I make art
so that the audience and artists can benefit and that's the whole
concept behind self-financing and self-promoting my own films. I don't promise
my crew a simple DVD copy for all their hard work or that I will try to
get it into festivals. That simply isn't good enough.

In this day and age, it is more possible than ever to find
creative ways to get your film out there and self distribute. That is my
goal with ThoughtfulDead: The Good and Evil Dead --
to get it seen by as many crazed zombie aficionados as possible. That
is my inspiration to keep making films, the possibilities that the films in
their very nature encapsulate the vibrant human spirit that every
soul I work with exudes and puts into each project.

Crew

Director/Writer/Editor: Ira Cooper

DOP: Patrick Shannon

First AD: Amanda Wolski

Lead Makeup: Andylinn Stockman

Makeup: Cayley Giene

Makeup: Sapphire Kozak

Makeup: Nicole Pilon

Catering: Rachel Chiasson

Cast

Brains: Aslam Husain

Terry: Jeff Kaiser

Harold/Huckleberry: Teddy Kellogg

Maude: Katie Copeland

Coriander: Mishelle Cuttler

Katie: Barbara Kozicki

Finn: Eric Carbery

Amethyst Saunar: Intensia the Zombie

Bear Mackenzie: Draggie the Zombie

There are also a slew of extras and people who assisted me with this project as well:

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About the Site

Undead Brainspasm is a subsite of Undead Backbrain (www.roberthood.net/blog). It is intended to supplement the main site by providing a repository for brief news items on what's been announced, what's in production and what's just been discovered (mostly by Kaiju Search-Robot Avery, aka Avery Guerra). It tends to feature low-budget horror/scifi films.